abu dhabi don't

The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix this last weekend.

On previous occasions it’s been horribly dull. Last year it was where the championship was decided and that, to be frank, was mainly because neither Fernando Alonso, Mark Webber nor Lewis Hamilton could make overtakes that they needed to.

As such, I was pretty much not expecting very much from the race.  They’d introduced two DRS zones, both of which were pretty big which was clearly an acknowledgement that overtaking was nearly impossible.  Indeed, they actually extended one of the zones for fear it wouldn’t help.

In the end the race was... okay.

The first third of the race had quite a lot of interest, but once things had settled down there was very little action.  My guess is there was more of interest further down the pack, but we didn’t get to see to much.

So I wouldn’t say it was the worst race this year, but it certainly wasn’t the greatest either.

I’m also a bit worried about the tyre issue.  The teams seem to have  started to get a better handle on them, as you'd expect, but also, Pirelli have been talking about making the softer tyres more durable for next year, which doesn’t bode well.  I was hoping they'd make some decisions that would throw another cat amongst the pigeons.  If they go for more “normal” tyres it could make next year less interesting.

Perhaps the most interesting thing in the race actually happened right at the beginning, when Sebastian Vettel seemed to have a puncture (there wasn’t a very good shot of it), which caused him to spin off and by the time he’d gotten back to the pits the back end of his car was trashed, so he had to retire.

This opened things up for a bit of a different result, but it also really underlined just how reliable the Red Bulls have been this year.  I’m pretty sure this has been Seb’s first retirement all year.

Reliability nowadays is remarkable - you very rarely see cars breaking down any more.  Back when I first started watching F1 you regularly used to see more than half of the grid braking down.

Given the extremes they deal with and the levels of precision required, it’s really remarkable.